And his sister was still dead.
One cold afternoon, squatting with his back to one of the barn’s stone walls, Quinn became aware the boy was watching him and, in time, Philippe tore over to him through a gaggle of geese. He had blue eyes and freckles across his nose. Quinn was fond of the boy. He wanted to assure him his mother and father would be fine and that the war would soon be over, but he didn’t know the language and, besides, he might well be wrong. False assurances were certainly more harmful than none at all.
Philippe sized him up and started talking. “You want,” he said in his fractured English, “you come with me. I show you … something.”
Quinn shook his head. He wanted to stay where he was, with his back against a wall that had probably been standing for three hundred years. But the boy was insistent. He tugged at Quinn’s sleeve and, eventually, he relented.
The village smelled of manure and of bread. They passed an old woman dressed in black who scowled at them. They arrived at a large, wooden door. Philippe knocked and implored whoever was on the other side to open up. After a few minutes, there was the sound of a bolt sliding back and they slipped through. A man ushered them into a stone portico that led to a courtyard. Quinn could now see the man was wearing a cassock: a priest, then. Quinn was becoming impatient. He was cold and hungry. He blew into his cupped hands and stamped his feet.
They stepped into a stable that was empty save for straw scattered over the ground. Philippe and the priest crossed to the far corner where they kneeled to sweep a space on the floor with their hands. They ran their fingers along the seam of what resembled a cellar door, which they hauled open by means of a brass ring. The priest was displeased, but lit a candle and descended grumbling into the cellar. Philippe indicated that Quinn should follow.
He paused. How was he to know these Catholics weren’t intending to murder him? He had heard rumours of such traitors. Had anyone seen him leave with the boy? He jammed his hands under his armpits and stared back to the trapezoid of sunlight aslant in the courtyard. But when Philippe urged him on, Quinn climbed down the wooden stairs.
The cellar was dank but bloomed with an incongruous tropical smell, like that of overripe fruit. The priest busied himself lighting extra candles and drew back a curtain before turning to Quinn with shy pride.
Quinn gasped. Lying on a low table was a girl dressed in white. In the uncertain light the table was indistinguishable from the gloom, and this gave her the appearance of hovering unsupported at waist height. On the wall above was pinned a card of the Virgin Mary and on a nearby shelf was an assortment of crosses, unlit candles, silver cups and trays. Philippe smiled and nodded. “Saint Solange,” he was saying. “C’est Saint Solange.”
The saint was young, with dark and brittle hair. Her hands, resting on her stomach, were thin and desiccated, more like claws, with fingernails the colour of port. A pink ribbon was tied around her neck, and attached to it by a tiny clasp was a silver cross partially hidden behind her high collar. Her dress was torn here and there, but most touching of all were the brown socks that covered her tiny feet.
Quinn was overcome. His throat quivered and burned. He clamped a hand across his mouth not only to prevent the escape of sobs that gurgled up from within, but to halt the very intake of breath. His eyes streamed with tears. The unmistakable dark, wet sounds of grief oozed through his fingers.
If a single image were to remain from Quinn’s time at war it would be of this saint who had been dead for hundreds of years but whose face—cracked and sallow as it was—lent her the look of mere sleep, as if she might open her eyes at any moment, turn to him and smile, as his mother now did in her airless room.
“Ah. My long-lost boy.” She fumbled for the glass of water on her bedside table. When she had drunk, she reached out to him, as was her habit. Around her on the bed were half-a-dozen books, some splayed open to reveal blocks of type. “Do you remember Ulysses? How during his adventures some of his men were given a plant to eat that made them forget all thoughts of home—of the past—and wish to remain exactly where they were? On an island, I think.”
Quinn did not remember, but nodded nonetheless. His mother was delirious.
“Lotus plant,” she went on. “Of course Ulysses also claimed to have had an encounter with a mob of Cyclops, so I am unsure how much we should believe his stories, you know.”
Quinn flicked through the pages of a book he had picked up. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Should I read you something?”
But she had descended into the labyrinth of her memory. “I remember how Sarah loved to play that game—what was it?—that one with the sheep bones. Knuckles! Balancing them on the back of her hand. She played it for hours, didn’t she? A sound through the house like rodents. That is what I remember of her, one of the things I remember about her. The damn things are probably still in her room. In that box, perhaps.”
Sarah had often nagged him to play that game with her and he had done so countless times—under the shade of a eucalypt, on the veranda when it rained, even in the dirt beneath the house when it was hot. The game remained a constant passion among so many passing fancies; she even had a particular set of the bones, each marked with a crude SW in blue ink that wore off and had to be re-lettered every few weeks.
They sat in silence for several minutes. The clock ticked.
“You have new clothes?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Where did you get them?”
Quinn fidgeted. He hated lying to his mother but told her he bought them.
“Not here, I trust.”
“No. In Sydney.”
His mother seemed satisfied. “Quinn, I was thinking. You should go away. Don’t stay here. Go to Queensland where you will be safe. Stay with your brother.” She rummaged under the bedclothes and produced a crumpled envelope that she pressed to him. “Here. It has his address on the back. Take it.”
“What does he think?”
“About what?”
“Does he think I did it?”
Mary hesitated. “We don’t speak of it, but I could write to him, I could tell him what you told me.”
He took the envelope but didn’t look at it. The paper was much handled.
“Why did you come back?”
He was dismayed. “I thought you would be glad.”
Mary looked stricken and coughed wetly. “Oh, Quinn. I am. I am. I told you: I would give anything for you all to be back here. You and William and Sarah. But what happened has happened. Everything has changed.”
The speech had drained her. She slumped back into the pillows. She coughed again, and Quinn held the glass of water to her lips. “Even the water tastes different,” she said when she had drunk. “This place has been poisoned. That’s what a murder does.”
His mother looked worse than on any previous occasion that Quinn had visited. She licked her lips over and over, and her face contorted as if the muscles beneath her sallow skin were operating under a malign influence.
“You are thin,” she said, as if now conducting a different conversation. “And ragged. Some think it might be the end of the world. The minister was here recently. He visits me on the veranda, too. Said it was in the Bible, as if that would make me feel better. The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever. Pestilence. It’s one of the four horsemen, you know.”
Quinn batted dust from his trousers. Rumours of the end of the world had been rife in the past few months. Men on the Argyllshire spoke nervously of the Virgin talking to girls in Portugal, of swarms of locusts in Palestine, of strange lights over all the waters of the world. It was something he didn’t wish to consider.
“What do you think, Quinn? You think this might be the end?”
He saw in his mother the expression that haunted those who feared they were soon to die, but wished to be reassured nonetheless. “I don’t think so,” he said at last, but without conviction.
“It is no matter. At least I will see my beloved Sar
ah.” She drank again from the water glass before continuing. “Widows, widowers. Orphan—and you know I was already one of those. Do you know, Quinn, there isn’t even a word for a parent who has lost a child? Strange, isn’t it? You would think, after all these centuries of war and disease and trouble, but no, there is a hole in the English language. It is unspeakable. Bereft.”
Quinn didn’t point out that there was no word, either, for a brother who has lost his only sister.
“Blessed are they that mourn,” she murmured, “for they shall be comforted.” His mother knew a Bible verse for most things.
She looked at him anew. Something had occurred to her. “Should I fear you, Quinn?”
“Please, Mother.”
A dry breeze edged through the heavy red curtain. She coughed. “If we didn’t believe in our children, the human race would be lost. When everything else is in ruins, family is all we have. And God, of course.”
She sighed and gestured at the books on the bed. “Your father brought these in this morning before he left. I asked him to fetch me something to read and he grabbed this armful. Can’t blame him, I suppose. Didn’t want to stay here with me too long.”
His mother fell still. Quinn examined the book in his hand. After a few minutes, he began to read out loud from a random page.
“How do you know that?” he read. “Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none … And no one has a right to say that no water babies exist, till they have seen no water babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water babies … ”
He continued to read for another ten minutes until his mother was asleep, but when he closed the book to leave, she opened her eyes and drew him towards her.
“Don’t go yet. Please.”
“Mother. You are unwell. I have to go before Father comes back.”
“Tell me where you were before the war. Tell me something of your life.”
He sighed. “Before the war I worked for a bloke on his farm,” he said. “And I built railways for a while near Grafton—”
Nathaniel’s voice called out from the yard. His mother gasped. Quinn heard the clump of his father’s boots on the veranda outside.
16
Panicked, Quinn stepped behind the wardrobe. His father leaned partway through the open window. Quinn shrank back further. His heart clattered beneath his ribs but his father didn’t see him in the shadows.
“Are you alright, Mary?”
“I’m fine.”
“But I heard talking.”
Mary shooed Nathaniel away from the window and he lurched backwards and fell into the chair on the veranda. It was clear he was drunk. His breathing was stolid. He asked again how she was.
“The doctor,” he was saying over and over, “the doctor can only do so much.” There was fear and trembling in his voice. He said the other medicine he had ordered from Sydney, whatever the bloody thing was called, was yet to arrive but it would come any day now. Things were so bloody slow.
After a few minutes he calmed down, and he and Mary talked of other things, but hesitantly, as if afraid of hurting each other. They spoke of the heat and of the goings-on of a Melbourne gangster. He told her further rumours about the epidemic: Joe Ryan saying he had heard it was, in fact, scarlet fever. Mary scoffed.
The wardrobe Quinn cowered against smelled of polish and was tacky to the touch, as if it were sweating out the coats of varnish applied to it over the years. Outside in the hot wind a gate creaked and slapped, creaked and slapped. He made out the pop pop sound of his father tapping his pipe against his palm to dislodge charred tobacco. Although he couldn’t see him clearly, Quinn knew his father would now lean forward and fill the pipe while staring into the middle distance, perhaps gnawing on his moustache as he did so. Despite his passionate nature, Nathaniel Walker was a man reluctant to engage in argument and this ritual of pinching tobacco from its tin, tamping it down and then searching for a match had always been effective in stalling an inconvenient interlocutor. There came the pleasing sweet smell of burning tobacco. His father rambled drunkenly about this and that.
Mary’s eyelids sagged like two flowers overburdened with dew, then her unhinged gaze drifted across the room and alighted, as if with reluctance, upon Quinn. Her skin gleamed with fever. “Tell me,” she said, not taking her eyes from her son. “What is it exactly you saw that day, Nathaniel?”
“What?” Nathaniel sat forward in his chair.
Mary licked her lips. “What did you see?”
“When, Mary?”
“On the day you found Sarah.”
From where he stood, Quinn was able to observe not only his mother lying supine on her bed as if upon a funeral barge, but also the spectral shape of his father behind the curtained window. He panicked. He wondered if this were a trap devised by his mother. Had she planned this all along? He shook his head at her, urging her to halt her queries.
Nathaniel grunted to himself. “By God. You never wanted to know the details before, Mary. Why now?”
“Perhaps it’s time.”
His father muttered something, to which Mary repeated her wish to hear exactly what had happened all those years ago.
Quinn shut his eyes. On the troopship back to Australia after the war there had been men made blind and deaf by their injuries. He had seen them shuffle forlornly around the surf-slick decks of the Argyllshire. They were stoppered vessels, wrapped in bandages, closed off, each inhabiting a landscape unto themselves as they faced an ocean they could neither see nor hear. Everything to them was black and noiseless. There was a private called Little Thommo who chested the railings as if checking they would bear his weight and who, sure enough, was one of those soon lost overboard. Quinn had watched them with fear and envy. What a terrible freedom, he thought, to be so sealed off from the rigours of the world.
Like a child reluctant to be discovered, he kept his eyes shut. Through muddy hearing he discerned the curtain flapping in the hot wind. He felt sure the beat-beat-beating of his heart could be heard several feet away and placed a hand on his chest as if it were a skittish animal he might quieten with his touch. He sensed his mother’s gaze still on him.
“It’s so long ago,” his father said at last.
“But you were so sure at the time—”
“I still am.”
“Then tell me.”
Quinn’s father belched. “I would rather not. You are ill. It is so many years ago.”
“Does it feel that way to you, Nathaniel? Does it? For me it is as if they are still here with me, both of them, all of them. Sarah and William and Quinn. All of them here moving around, coming in and out of my room, asking me things. Do you remember when Quinn went through that phase of insisting his name was duck? Over and over you used to ask him what his name was, just to hear him say it. My little duck, you called him. Do you remember? And how serious and quiet William was, even as a boy? And poor Sarah …” Mary lapsed into weeping.
Quinn’s father smoked his pipe. His silence made it clear his wife’s tears were nothing new to him.
After several minutes, he spoke. “I came down the road on the mare we had at the time. Jenny. It was late—I’m sure you remember that—and Sarah had been gone for hours. The pair of them had been gone all afternoon. You know how they were together, always plotting at something like a pair of bloody savages. It was the boy’s fault, of course. Sarah was too young to be left in his care so much—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They looked after each other.”
His father harrumphed. “Do you remember when they went missing once, a year or so before … before Sarah died? When they were meant to be at school? And they got it into their heads to steal something from Oliver Sharp’s place. That was the boy’s idea. And someone found them down there with my spade and dragged them home. Lucky old Sharp didn’t know what was going on.”
Quinn recalled that morning vividly. It
was a bright, crisp day in spring, three years before Sarah was killed. William, at eighteen, was helping Mr. Greely in his orchard most days. All three of them set off early, walking together to Greely’s place, from where Quinn and Sarah would make their own way to school.
Sarah loved school because it multiplied the pool of children available for her to organise into troupes for her various games. Passersby chuckled at the sight of her standing on a fruit box, from where she would dictate the rules of her latest endeavour to half-a-dozen squirming children. In her boldness and in her quest for novelty, she was more like their father than anyone divined.
Most mornings, Quinn would pause at a scrappy track near their home to throw stones at a tin sign hammered to a tree twenty feet away, on which were scrawled the words no shoot. From five attempts he usually hit the sign at least three times.
Sarah watched him throw with a critical eye. “No chance,” she said as Quinn released the first stone, which indeed sailed wide of the mark. “You always throw much too far to the right.”
Quinn tried again and was this time rewarded with the satisfying clank of rock striking tin. Sarah clapped in delight and urged him to throw again. Quinn succeeded in his next three efforts. William was by now a fair way off and called out for them to hurry, but they ignored him. Excited, Sarah told Quinn that if he hit the sign on the next throw it would be five times in a row.
Again William called out to them that he was going. Quinn waved to show he had understood, and William vanished into the trees.
“If you hit it five times in a row you get a prize,” Sarah said as she handed him a suitable rock.
“What’s the prize?”
Sarah looked down at a blade of grass in her hand. “You got to do it first, Pim.”
He paused, then wheeled around and threw the rock without even taking aim. The throw was perfect. Clank. Sarah squealed and flung her arms around his neck.
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